What
David Irving made of the diary entry for March 27,
1942 in his biography, "Hitler's War" (1991, Focal
Point edition)

As
he argued in court, it was necessary to deal with
it more fully in the Goebbels biography than in
Hitler's War because while the passage was
clearly evidence against Goebbels himself, it was
not evidence against Hitler to the same degree. --
Readers of these pages may well ponder on what
permitted the British High Court despite these two
works to describe the author in April 2000 as a
"Holocaust denier".

[...] Dr. Goebbels, agitating from
Berlin, clearly hoped for a more speedy and
ruthless solution, although he held his tongue when
meeting his Führer. On March 19 he quoted in
his diary only this remark by Hitler: "The
Jews must get out of Europe. If need be, we must
resort to the most brutal methods."

That Goebbels privately knew more is plain from
his diary entry on the twenty-seventh: "Beginning
with Lublin," he recorded, "the Jews are being
pushed out eastward from the Generalgouvernement. A
barbaric and indescribable method is being employed
here and there's not much left of the Jews
themselves. By and large you can probably
conclude that sixty percent of them have to be
liquidated, while only forty percent can be put to
work." Dr. Goebbels recorded further that the
Trieste-born SS Brigadier Odilo Globocnik
[right],
the

HITLER'S WORD IS LAW 465

former Gauleiter of Vienna, was performing this
task carefully and unobtrusively. As fast as the
ghettos of the Generalgouvernement were being
emptied, they were being refilled with the Jews
deported from the Reich, and the cycle started over
again. "The Jews have nothing to laugh about now,"
commented Goebbels. But he evidently never
discussed these realities with Hitler.

Thus this two-faced minister dictated, after a
further visit to Hitler on April 26, "I have once
again talked over the Jewish question with the
Führer. His position on this problem is
merciless. He wants to force the Jews right out of
Europe. . . . At this moment Himmler is handling
the major transfer of Jews from the German cities
into the eastern ghettos."

Not just from Germany either: the European Jews
were being rounded up in occupied France, Holland,
Belgium, and the eager Nazi satellite Slovakia.
From Hans Frank's Generalgouvernement too --
beginning with the ghettos of Lublin -- the Jews
were being shipped eastward under Globocnik's
direction. Upon arrival, thousands were evidently
simply being murdered.

The available documents shed only oblique rays
of light on the level of blame for this atrocity.
At a Generalgouvernement cabinet meeting in Cracow
on April 9, 1942, Hans Frank disclaimed
responsibility: "It is obvious," he said, "that the
work process will be disrupted if in the midst of
this labor program the order comes to turn over all
Jews for liquidation. . . . The directive," he
explained, "comes from higher up."* From a letter
signed by SS Oberführer Viktor Brack to
Himmler on June 23, it became clear that
Himmler was anxious to conceal the operation,
because he quoted Globocnik as being eager to get
it over with as quickly as possible in case one day
force majeure should prevent them from
completing it: "You yourself Reichsführer,
once mentioned that you felt the job should be done
as quickly as possible if only for reasons of
concealment."

The gulf between the actual atrocities in the
east, and what Hitler knew or said about them,
widened. Over lunch on May 15 Hitler again merely
spoke to his staff about transporting the Jews
eastward; he referred indignantly to the misplaced
sympathies of the bourgeoisie. How well the Jews
were faring, he remarked, compared with the German
emigrants of the nineteenth century-many of whom
had even died on route to Australia!
Goebbels, unhappy that forty thousand Jews still
remained in "his" Berlin, raised the subject at
lunch with Hitler on the twenty-ninth. ("I once
again inform the Führer on my plan to evacuate
every single

Jew from Berlin. . .") Hitler merely expatiated
on the best postwar homeland for the Jews. Siberia
was out-that would just produce an even tougher
baccilus [??sp] strain of Jews; Palestine
was out too-the Arabs did not want them; perhaps
central Africa? At all events, he summed up,
western Europe must be liberated of its Jews-there
could be no homeland for them there. As late as
July 24 Hitler was still referring at table to his
plan to transport the Jews to Madagascar-by now
already in British hands-or some other Jewish
national home after the war was over.
[...]

Website note

Note: From
the all-important sentence referring explicitly
to "liquidated", conformist translators like
Prof Richard ("Skunky") Evans like to leave out
the word wohl (line 5) which means
"perhaps" or
"probably", no
doubt because it tends to bring out that
Goebbels is speculating, and does not know for
certain.